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Comment by mattmanser | Hacker News Reader

Seriously, please drop it. Javascript is not used to code games much, C++ is. Javascript is pretty awful performance wise.

Also, porting a whole code base to another language at this stage in the game is such a colossal task.

Are you even a developer? I'm not sure you realise how infeasible what you're suggesting is.

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emscripten would like to have a word with you. Also, Javascript is one of the most heavily optimized dynamic languages in existence, and has orders of magnitude more code and programmers using/written in it, than java, scala, ruby, lua, etc. Rewriting any game in javascript is imho a great idea. (I am a C/C++ game developer with ~25 years of experience.)

Orders of magnitude more code written in it than Java? Hohoho good one. HTH: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.... http://githut.info

Java may have been a stretch.. but think about how many web apps have been written.. and consider that a large %age of user time is spent in the browser who's language IS javascript.. Ive removed java from my systems since oracle ganked it. Java is used in lots of business/banking software, true.. but even the tiobe charts u linked show it declining in popularity.. contrasting w js being language of the year 2014. As for the other DYNAMIC languages.. it's no contest.

It wasn't a "stretch." It was flat out wrong.

> Rewriting any game in javascript is imho a great idea.

How do you deal with the fact that the only native numeric type is a 64bit float? Space Engineers currently uses floats as the basis for their world coordinate system. Things get really bumpy when you get far away from [0,0,0].

32/64 bit float is the native float type on the cpu you are running on.. hence you can't really claim "native" support for larger types.. if you mean native in terms of being able to write a+b for a numeric type, then that eliminates all languages that don't have operator overloading..

I mean "native" in terms of what's supported by the language itself, out of the box.

C and C++ offer -at a minimum- the following numeric types:

* signed and unsigned integers in a variety of widths

* 32 and 64-bit floating point numbers

JavaScript offers:

* 64-bit floating point numbers

When performing integer math, JavaScript's numeric type is only safe for arithmetic operations between -((2^53)-1) and +((2^53)-1).

Now that we have that out of the way, my original question remains unanswered. :)

In general 54-bit signed ints are enough for games. Floats are more common for math.

Cool.

Many contemporary games are multi-threaded out of necessity. How would you deal with JavaScript's single-threaded, single-process model of execution? Experimental features like Web Workers?

No disagreement on that one! If your application must be multi-threaded, it does make sense to write it in a language with proper multi-threading support.

nod nod I just wish irascible would come back. I was interested in hearing what -from his 25 years of game development experience- makes him feel that "Rewriting any game in javascript is imho a great idea.".

I'm obviously missing something, and I was looking for the benefit of his insight.

This is not a game that requires the level of precision one would get with C++ (yet it sucks performance wise even when it's being programmed in C++).

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